Paul as a Leader in his Letters and Acts

A new take on the long-standing debate on the images of Paul in his letters and the images of Paul in Acts!

Erich Benjamin Pracht advances scholarship on the Paul of the letters and the Paul of Acts in two ways. First, the author introduces a modern concept of leadership, namely transformational leadership theory, as the lens through which he interprets modeling and remodeling images of Paul. In this way, Pracht takes a major step forward from previous perspectives in the Paul-and-Acts debate, which typically approach the issue by probing the historicity of the Lukan Paul, or by comparing how well the Lukan Paul resembles the Paul of the letters in terms of theological themes, style and language use, or major biographical claims. Second, this study shows that Cicero and Sallust can also be read in terms of modeling and remodeling images of leadership. Accordingly, Pracht undertakes a detailed investigation of this pair of authors to generate perspectives that inform the Paul-and-Acts debate.

Auteur
Erich Benjamin Pracht earned a PhD in New Testament studies from Aarhus University. He is currently employed at Aarhus University as a postdoc in the research group called Computing Antiquity. Accordingly, his current work involves curating a database of digitized Greek texts that are machine readable and deploying quantitative/statistical methods as exegetical tools. In this connection, he takes as his starting point classic questions in New Testament studies, such as Paul and the Pastorals or the place of Hebrews in its literary network, and utilizes new computational approaches to address these and other long-standing research questions. He holds a Master of Theology from Candler School of Theology, Emory University in Atlanta (graduated 2018). He is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature and Collegium Biblicum.